Movie review: Sunshine

Posted in Showbiz |

The trouble with sci-fi movies today is that they try to substitute suspense with special effects and camouflage a shaky premise with shaky camera movements, with the belief that inducing audiences to motion sickness, somehow hopefully translates into a great movie experience.

Sunshine is a movie that has some heavyweight credentials. Written by Alex Garland of “The Beach” and directed by award-winning director Danny Boyle of “Trainspotting”, the storyline is about how a group of people are dispatched to the sun with a bomb to try and rekindle a dying sun because, as we all know, without the sun, earth becomes a lifeless rock.

The filmmakers carefully assemble a racially balanced group comprising whites, asians, latins and blacks. Oh wait - there is no black person, just an unusually high percentage of asian representation in a western mainstream film. The Captain is Japanese (Kenada), the person in charge of the garden which gives oxygen and food is some Asian - maybe Filipino (her name is Corazon) and the guy who makes the fatal mistake which leads everyone into hell is Korean or Chinese (name is Trey).

You are reminded of parts of other sci-fi films - the villian and storyline is similar to the one in “Event Horizon”, the storyline is also similar to “Alien”. The middle of the movie starts to drag but it’s too late to realise you’ve wasted $8 and 90 minutes of your life which you can never get back. The ending is mostly a jumble of shaky, pixelated images of the villian and lots of scene jumps which are hard to figure out what was going on.